(gentle upbeat music)

All right, everybody,

I'm gonna go ahead and get started. And if anybody else wants to join, they can just come on in. Hello, everybody. My name is Aimee DeFoe. I am a Senior Education Developer here at VEX, and I'm super excited to start this Live Session with you guys about Makerspaces for Creative Learning. As much as I absolutely adore educational robotics, I love makerspaces and maker-centered learning that much as well. So combining the two is super exciting to me, and I am excited to get to share with you some ideas that you can take away from this session and use in your makerspace or your classroom maker area right away.

So I'm gonna share with you sort of the agenda that what we're going to be doing tonight. All right, so what we're gonna do first is just talk a little bit about why 123, GO, and IQ are a great fit for makerspaces, what makes them really useful in makerspaces. We're gonna talk a bit about creating projects together using VEX with your students, and we'll explore some ways to use transparent craft materials with LEDs and VEX kits. We're gonna make some fun projects that you can use in your classrooms, and those projects are building and coding some animals with the LEDs using GO. But even though we're using GO, it'll be directly applicable to IQ as well. So you could use VEX IQ for the animal project. And we're going to make and code a little flying saucer using VEX 123. And then we'll add some extra sensors to both projects to make them even more interactive. So it's a lot for an hour. I'm gonna try to hopefully get it all in.

If you have any questions throughout the course of this session, you can type them in the chat and have Audra here, my colleague, who will answer them, and if she needs me to, I can answer some of them at the end of the session as well.

All right, so why do I think VEX is perfect for makerspaces? Well, first of all, I think it gives you the chance to have sessions of iteration with less frustration. So I don't know exactly what everybody's makerspace situation is, but I know if when kids are trying to make something and they have a whole bunch of different materials out and they may need to glue a lot of things together or they may need to wire things or solder things or put together materials in a complicated way, sometimes it gets very frustrating. But if you're using VEX GO or VEX IQ and you're building, you can very quickly build something, you can deconstruct it really quickly if you don't like it and try again. You can test your ideas out quickly. It just makes that cycle less frustrating and allows kids to get to, you know, sharing their projects and coding if that's what they're interested in as well. So that's one really great reason VEX GO, VEX IQ are ideal fits for your makerspace.

Also with all three, 123, GO, and IQ, you don't have a big mess left on in your space. When you're done, you can easily pack everything up in the storage that's provided. So if you're one of those people that has maybe not a makerspace but just a corner of your classroom that you're using for a maker education, this is a great solution because you don't have an ongoing mess that you're always having to deal with.

Another thing that's really cool is because of the VEX continuum, it is easy to facilitate students of different ages who might be working on similar projects at the same time. So as you'll see tonight, all of the projects that we're doing, you could do basically with any age just changing it a little bit for the project. So for example, what we're doing with GO, you could do with IQ, you can be a bit more complicated with IQ. You can code things a little bit more in more complex ways, but kids of different ages can work at the same time doing similar things. That means when you're facilitating this, you don't have as many things to manage in the classroom.

You don't have to be interacting with different coding platforms. They're all very similar, so it just takes a layer of that teacher facilitation stress out of it. And I think that can be really huge. I don't know about you, but every time I've done maker stuff after school, I've had a wide range of ages of kids in my session at the same time. So having something that takes off some of the cognitive load of my facilitation would've been fantastic. So there's that.

Another thing is that it's really easy and fun to combine all of these VEX products with other materials, and we're gonna explore that tonight, messing around with some transparent materials and LEDs. So there's that.

All right. So when you are trying to think of ideas for what you're gonna do with VEX in your makerspace, I would suggest that you can use VEX curriculum as a jumping-off point. You could use activities, you can use STEM Labs too, and look at them to see what it sparks in your imagination. The activity that we're going to do tonight with GO actually kind of came from the creature creation activity. This is just designing and building an animal or insect of your own using VEX GO pieces. And I just thought, hey, what if I took this just a little bit further by adding some coding, adding some sensors, you know, what could we do? Adding some more materials, some transparent materials, and craft materials.

So if you're kinda stuck for ideas and you wanna suggest something to your students, you could go through some of the activities and some of the STEM Labs and see if anything in there really sparks your imagination. And you don't have to just look at GO activities for coming up with a maker activity for GO. You could look at 123, you could look at IQ, because what you're gonna do is adapt them to fit whatever scenario you might have. So another activity that's really similar is the Coder Monster activity for 123. So I highly suggest just looking through there to get some ideas to spark your own creativity.

When you're doing maker projects, I think it is really important to involve your students in the creation of these activities and coming up with ideas for projects, because one of the best things about maker education is the student agency that's involved with it, right? So you wanna get your students' input, you wanna brainstorm with them, but you also don't wanna make it unmanageable or give them so many choices that they're overwhelmed. So that's one reason that using activities could be a great jumping-off point.

You could also give your students just time to play and explore with an IQ kit, the GO kit, with the 123, and see if after they've played with it, just putting together some of the pieces, building, or doing a little coding might spark an idea for an activity. Then you can ask them to brainstorm with you as a group, and you can write them down. Then narrow them down together and figure out what you're gonna do in a way that's fun but not too overwhelming.

Another thing you could do is use a material or an idea as a theme. And that's what we're gonna do tonight with transparent materials. You could talk to... You know, I don't know if you're doing like an afterschool makerspace, maybe you could ask the students' teachers what they're working on in class and try to spark their creativity to take it a little bit further. You can ask the students what they're interested in so you can let projects emerge. Then brainstorm and guide them in such a way that you have helped them co-create the projects in a way that's manageable for you.

All right. So now we're starting to get to the exciting stuff. So tonight is all about using transparent or translucent materials with the LEDs under the VEX robots to create some fun and interesting things. So what I did was I went to...

Thank you for joining us tonight. We hope you find inspiration and creativity in your makerspace projects. Have fun exploring and creating with your students!

We have a creative reuse store here in Pittsburgh where you can just get random stuff. So I went and bought a whole bunch of transparent and translucent things from their bulk section just to get some ideas. That's me exploring materials to get ideas. And that's one thing I was just saying you could do with your kids. If you look around your classroom or your house, you're gonna find, I don't even know how many random clear plastic things that you can use.

Some of the things that I would suggest, I've got little samples up here. Some of the things I found that I thought were really useful would be like a coffee cup type lid. There's always bubble wrap, which is cool and textured and makes some really neat effects. This happens to be like a light blue bubble wrap. It comes in a bunch of colors, so that could be really fun experimenting with that. This is just like a piece of a page protector. You can cut this up, draw on it with sharpies, or fold it into weird shapes. So there's that possibility.

What else do I have? I think this is a detergent scooper, so something like that might be useful. Ping-pong balls can be awesome. You can cut them in half and put LEDs inside them and let them glow. Don't let kids do that though. This is definitely something that adults need to do 'cause, you know, it's slippery around and dangerous. But if you wanted to do that ahead of time, another thing is like a little foam ball can sometimes let the light pass through it. It kinda depends but it's worth trying.

This is just a clear file folder, like a plastic file folder that I cut up. There's always, what is this called? I forget this mesh that you sew through. And then this is just like a piece of a transparency from a textbook. It's like some kind of science textbook. These are fun too 'cause they're probably laying around your school somewhere and nobody's using them, and then they have all these different interesting colors on them. So you could use something like that.

Those are just some examples of the kind of transparent materials you might explore with. But really, you can do just about anything that's transparent. One really easy fun center activity that you could do is just have some of these and let kids take some time to test, you know, what are the effects, what does it look like when the LED shines through this? What does it look like when it shines through that? What could I do with it? Giving them some prompts and letting them experiment with materials as a center in your classroom could be a really great way of getting their maker juices flowing. Or you could do the same thing in an afterschool maker time.

All right, so now we get to the really fun stuff. What we're gonna do first is I'm gonna show you an interactive VEX GO light-up owl that I created using VEX GO pieces and some craft supplies in transparent materials. I'll show it to you and then we're gonna build it so you can kinda see how I put it together.

All right.

Okay.

So here's my little owl and I'm just gonna open up VEXcode here. It's actually already open, but I just need to get to my tab. All right. It's a little hard to see in here because we have such very bright studio lights. So I'm just gonna like kind of close my hands around the owl's face. But you can see that underneath his eyes, the red touch LED is glowing. It's actually LED bumper 'cause it's VEX GO. But you can certainly do this with IQ.

All right, so the way that I did this, well, let's just take a look at it here. So here's my little owl, he can sit up just fine, he can sit on a shelf if I wanted him to. I've got the brain in the battery on the back and you can see his wings are attached to some angle beams here. I've got two little contraptions that I built here to even out so it doesn't wobble. So I just... Because this part is sticking up more, I needed to even it out, so I did that.

On the front underneath here, you can see the LED is there. And these are attached, the standoffs. And then here, I have used some pipe cleaners. So this was super easy and fun to build. Got a little button for the beak.

One thing you might wanna consider is, and we'll talk about this a little bit more later, is making sure that you leave room for additional sensors if you want to. And so the sensors aren't blocked if they need to do... You know, if it's a distance sensor, it needs to detect an object. So that's a consideration while building.

So let's build this little owl so you can kinda see how I put it together and I can talk you through sort of what I was thinking when I was figuring it out. So we'll do that next. Slide this in here. Okay.

So what I did, and you can see this here, is I just attached my brain and my battery together to sort of keep them kind of as a unit. And so I'm gonna do that real quick with some pins. You don't really have to use floor but here. If kids are involved, it's probably for the best. Okay, and I've got that ready to go, so we can see what I've got here like this. And then I attached the plate. I wanna make sure I don't cover up my on/off button there, right? So I'm gonna do it on this side.

When I was doing this, I was just kind of looking at the pieces that were in my kit. I went ahead and took out all the pieces that I need for it to show you. But when I was actually going through the process of figuring this out, I was like looking at the pieces and I was thinking about, I had in my head that I wanted to make an owl. Don't know why, but I did. And I was looking at the pieces trying to think, well, how can I make this work? You know, because the pieces don't necessarily at first glance look like an animal. So you kinda have to stretch a little bit to think about how you are going to make the VEX GO pieces into what you want it to do. And it's a really fun challenge.

You can ask kids guiding questions if they're having trouble envisioning that. Like, you know, what might this piece be? Like, what does this look like to you? Could it be a wing? Wow, well, maybe you wanna make a bird. So just kind of guiding kids that are stuck in that way can be really helpful.

All right, so then I needed a little space between... I didn't wanna attach everything just right on here. I wanted a little space so I can make my wings move. And so the way that I solved that problem was to use these connectors. And they have pins on either side, so that makes it easy. So I snapped one of those in here, one of these up here. Add it on the second plate. So we look at it to get it here. Here we go. All right. So that's basically the main body of my owl right there.

These little pieces too were very inspiring to me. They look like owl. They're not... Are they ears? I don't know the little tufty things on the top of an owl. Just realizing I'm not sure about that as I'm talking about it here. And then I use the blue standoffs to attach them. Put that right there. This one right here. And then I'm just double checking but it looks like I attached it that way. And you can play with the direction of things, you know. Does it look like how I want it to look? See, that one's backwards. Oh, do I have it? There we go. Spatial reasoning for me as well. Good practice. Okay. So I did that.

And then I was thinking about, okay, I want my owl's eyes to light up. I was thinking that maybe the owl was asleep and somebody came and woke him up, and so his eyes are flashing red because he's a little bit angry. I got that a little funny. So attach my sensor, I'm gonna stick some pins back here. Do that real quick. And then I need to think about my cord too, right? Like where do I want my cord to go so that it's not in the way. So I made it come out the top here. And, you know, it might depend on what else you're doing, to your creation where you want it to come out. But for the owl, this made the most sense.

So I'm gonna snap this guy in there right about there, make sure my cord is between. All right, so there we go. And I'm gonna go ahead and plug them in. I'm sticking him into port one for now. I can always change it if I want to, but that's what I've got for now.

All right. And then for the wings. So these little angle beams, close this 'cause I don't wanna knock into it, and lock it. Again, mess. That could easily happen. All right. And then I played around a little bit with how I wanted to attach the wings. I don't know if you can see this, but it's attached in here at the end, very end of the short side. So that's what I'm gonna do. Not with green, I'm gonna use red. Okay, there we go. And then I just attached them where I thought wings on an owl should be, which I guess it's right there.

All right. And then the last thing to do to make this little stand contraption, here's how I did that. I got four of these connectors and I just put one inside the other. Actually, I'm gonna like orient my pieces the same way so I can see exactly what I did before and not confuse myself, which is a good trick. So I had two and like this think. And two like this. And it worked out just fine. And I just had to like play around with it a little bit till I sort of figured out what would work. Now, doing something funny, what am I doing? I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. So I'm gonna turn it again towards me. Oh, here's what I did wrong. See how these are pointing up? They need to be going this way. And then I can put these in. And that keeps it from falling over, otherwise it would be like tilting back like this and that. That just bothered me. I didn't want that to be. All right, so there we have the skeleton of the owl.

And then I was asking myself, what kind of transparent material or translucent material do I wanna use to make these eyes? So what I started out with was, I'm gonna take this off, was this coffee filter. And so I drew on the coffee filter and I had actually poked it through a couple of standoffs to keep it on there. But then I realized I didn't need to do that. I just taped it right with double-sided tape onto my LED. And by the way, you don't wanna glue anything obviously onto your VEX parts. No, that's not going to do a service to your kit. You wanna keep your kit nice. Might be tempting to glue or hot glue but you don't wanna do that. You can use double-sided tape for a lot of different things. It works really well. It sticks for a long time. You can also use these little adhesive dots. Of course, if you're giving these to kids, you wanna dole them out very carefully 'cause they're kind of expensive and you need to sort of show them how to use them effectively before you let them have them because otherwise they're gonna disappear pretty fast. But both of these things work really well. Also, just like regular tape rolled into a tape roll or masking tape works just fine too.

Okay, so first, I had a little coffee filter idea and I liked that, but I wanted to experiment with some other things too. So this little eye nose combo here is actually page protector that I just basically took a yellow sharpie and drew all over the page protector. Then I cut my shape out that I wanted and then I drew the eyes on with black sharpie on top. And then I just used one of those glue dots to stick 'em on. And then I realized like layering them up looked pretty cool and really alley. So that's how I landed on that. But you could definitely try other materials too. You could draw on some bubble wrap and see what that does. It's totally up to you. I kinda wanted my owl to be cute, but that's just me. You know, you can make your owl angry or weird or whatever you wanna do. It's your creation and, of course, it doesn't have to be an owl.

I also just wanted to tell you how I did the wings because I thought they turned out pretty cool.

I used felt for these because I didn't have any construction paper, but you could definitely use construction paper. Just to make this really easy, just to show you what I did in case you wanted to do something like it. I had rectangles that I cut in half this way. So like when you do that, it basically makes... It's basically kind of a wing shape already, right? Well, let's see. Like that. And then I just cut, not gonna do it 'cause I don't wanna take up too much time, but I cut like little feathery shapes out of it and did the same thing. Another piece, cut it in half, cut little feather shapes out of it, layered them on there, and double-sided tape them to my beam. So you can see. I even have my tape sticking out. I don't know if you can see it. But it works pretty well. So that's basically the creation of the owl.

Let me show you my VEX GO project that I made for it too. Organize my still here a little bit. Okay. Right. So let's do this and this. So here's the project that I made for it. I made sure to set my brightness to 100 because we want the LED to be as fun and as flashy as possible, so I wanted it to be fully bright. And then in a forever loop, I just used the set bumper block. I first made it red. I added a wait in there. I wanted it to flash quickly, so I just did half a second. And then I turned my bumper off and added another wait in there. And then put it all in a forever loop, so it just keeps on flashing in red for as long as I keep the project going. I could have made it flash red or green. I could have made my flash time slower or more quickly or more quick. But that's what I decided since I was thinking he was kind of mad because somebody woke him up.

So what I'm gonna do is when I share the recording of this session, I will also share the projects that I did, so that if you wanted to take them and use them, you could do that.

All right. Let's go back to here. All right. So the next thing I was going to show you is what if you wanted to make a project like this a little bit more interactive? So right now, we've got our LED bumper on here. But what if we wanted to make it so that when the owl detected that someone was near him, then his eyes flashed red. Or for example, the visitor came and woke him up, he noticed it and then his eyes flashed red. That was my little scenario. So we could add in the distance sensor I have right here. And I'm gonna put it on this guy. So again, you wanna think about where your cord's gonna go. I'm gonna have it go off to the side here. So I'm gonna put it on sideways. And I'm thinking about my little beak. I don't want the beak to cover the sensor, but as you can see, it doesn't. In this case, it should work just fine. Plug it in. It belongs in the teal receptacle. Okay. All right. So now, I've got that and then I just added in. I'll share this project with you as well.

Here we go. All right. Actually, let's see what happens, 'cause I have both windows open and I'm not totally sure. Okay, let me connect from here. All right, so this time, you can see that I have my bumper. Or I have the brightness set to 100. I then have a wait until block. So I've got wait until the eye detects an object. So my eye sensor here. And then a repeat loop so that if the eye finds an object, it's gonna flash red and then off. So let's test that out. Okay, I'm just gonna give you a view of it. And then I'm gonna put my hand in here, see if it starts the project for me. Oops, I don't know. You see it? Oh, so it's stuck. One second. A little troubleshooting. I'm just gonna make sure that that other GO project is not interfering 'cause I have many tabs open here. Okay. Let's see what happens now. Start it. I'm gonna try one more time here. I'm gonna reconnect. I closed the other window. All right, let's see. Worked before. Well, I'm struggling to get this one to work and I don't wanna spend a bunch of time with it, but it definitely will work.

Thank you for your patience and for joining me in this session. I hope you found it helpful and inspiring. If you have any questions or need further assistance, feel free to reach out. Have a great day!

So I will share this project with you again so that if the sensor detects your hand or the intruder, then the eye is going to flash red and off. Here's what that looks like one more time so you can see it.

All right, so I don't wanna spend too much more time on GO because I have a 123 project to share with you as well. Oh, one other thing I wanted to tell you is pipe cleaners are really great to use with VEX everything because you can stick them through these holes and bend them into any shape you want. So I highly recommend having a big bunch of pipe cleaners in your makerspace when you're using VEX GO or VEX IQ.

All right, so let's move on. I've got another project. The next one. Whoops. There we go. The next one is making a flying saucer with VEX 123. So let's take a look at that one. I'm gonna switch my stuff out here. Close things so it won't spill or make a big mess. We'll put now back where he was.

Okay. So this is a really super easy fun activity that you can do with 123 in a makerspace, in a maker center, for a maker night in your school. I think this would be a really fun one that parents and kids could do together. It doesn't require very many materials and it doesn't require very much time. So if you were trying to do something really quickly that would be, you know, entertaining and fun and a good bonding thing for kids and parents, this would be a great one.

So all I did here, there's a couple different, I'll show you two different ways you could do this, is I got one of those like ice coffee lids and I just drew on it and used metallic sharpies and I drew these little, I don't know, flying saucer like things on the side. I attached some shiny mesh material that I found at that reuse store. I cut a little alien head. Like this is the little window I drew on and I cut the little alien head out of a blue file folder and stuck it on there.

And the cool thing about these lids is that if you're coding with touch, you can actually just stick your finger in there and go ahead and continue to code, which is pretty crazy. So like, you know, I can just reach in there and say, tell it to drive and it will. So that's pretty fun. Drove it right out of the frame. Yeah, so that would be like, you don't even need any glue or any kind of sticky stuff. Although, of course, you could attach this to an art ring if you wanted to. But I liked the simplicity of this where you just make something, drop it on there, and then kids can code it.

Of course, you can also code it using the coder. There's a project already in here, so I'm gonna like get these going. All right, this guy is getting... So in this project, let me slide this over, sorry. I'm doing a good job of showing. Okay. In this project, maybe that looks better, I used all of the different colors that are available in the LED on 123, 'cause the more the better when LEDs are involved in my personal opinion. So it's gonna go to green, gonna drive a little bit, it's gonna turn. Turn purple. Get it out there. Blue. And then it's just gonna keep doing that, driving around my table, which you can't see very well, but that's what it's doing.

So I put a go to start at the end. So my flying saucer would just continue to drive around for as long as I wanted it to. Flashing different colors. So that's a project that uses all 10 slots in the coder. It doesn't have to, of course. If there are kids that are really driving, you just wanna have them make it glow green and that's it. That's perfectly acceptable. Whatever works for them to make them happy and feel like they accomplish something.

Wooh. All right, we'll stop it. But so you get the idea with that. Really fun, really easy, really inexpensive and really quick. So there's that.

I wanted to share this other version of it with you that one of my colleagues made. And what they did was, this one you couldn't code with cuts, right?

Thank you for your attention and I hope you find these projects as exciting and engaging as I do. Happy making!

Because they put a plastic piece of plastic over it and then they used this little slinky here. And hopefully, you can see this, but they actually put Colonel Joe inside there. Oh, he's not sticking. So they could like beam him up. You know, he's like caught in the alien beam getting beamed up to the flying saucer. I thought that was so clever. So that was cute and fun.

And then with this one, you would have to code either using the coder or using VEXcode, right? Because you can't reach the touch buttons. Let's see, I think I have a project for this one. Yeah, this one I'll do with the additional sensor too. So of course, the VEX 123 has an eye sensor right here. So if you wanted to challenge your students to add in an additional sensor here, not just the LED, you could do that. And just like we did with go, just make sure that when you are making your saucer that you don't put something that would block the sensor. So if you're drawing on the cup lid, you don't wanna have a big polka dot or something or other right there.

Also, if you are not really keen on the idea of having your kids use sharpies, I think there's, you know, mixed feelings about that. Didn't bother me, but I know that sometimes people don't wanna do that. You don't have to draw. You could get stickers to stick on, you could glue things on. It could be whatever you wanted. So I did drawing 'cause it's easy. But, of course, you're gonna do what works best in your environment.

All right, so I'm gonna share this project with you. First, I'm gonna connect 123 real quick. Pair it up. Oops, except that it went off. Or maybe I never turned that one on. All right, let's get connected here. I am having a technical difficulty. All right. I think I'm just gonna use this other 123 to show you this project just so I don't fight with it and trying to get to there. There we go. I think this one is the one that is paired. So I'm gonna start it.

Music Cue: Start Project

What I have here is that it's gonna drive forward until the eye sensor detects an object. Then it's gonna stop and glow some colors and act happy because this flying saucer is a happy flying saucer. All right, let's go. So it detected me. Let's run that again, 'cause I had it facing the back. Oops. So it's detecting my hand, it's floating colors and it's spinning. Let's do it one more time so you can see it. There we go. Hopefully, that'll work. Got it before it went out of the frame. But you get the idea so you can add the additional sensor in there and have your flying saucer be just that much more interactive.

And, of course, if you're working with kids of different, you know, you are trying to differentiate, some kids can add the additional sensor in, some kids cannot. So it doesn't really matter, but it gives you that extra added challenge for the kids that need it. And still everyone can be doing the same project and sharing what they're doing with each other and enjoying that without any trouble.

All right. So let me go back to my slideshow. Remember where it is. All right. So a couple other things that I wanted to share with you. So, of course, you can add an additional sensors on. I did the distance sensor for this session. In other sessions, we'll explore other sensors and other materials and other fun ideas. But one thing that you can do with GO and with IQ is add multiple LEDs at one time.

So I just wanted to show you real quick what that would look like. So I didn't actually build a project with this, but if you wanted to create an animal or anything, you wanted to make a little house or you wanted to make, I don't know, a water feature, I was thinking without real water, but like I was imagining making some fun fountains with like plastic as the water and you know how fountains light up in different colors and in patterns, I think that could be really fun. But then you would need several LEDs so you can actually...

Thank You Note:

Thank you for joining me in this session. I hope you found it informative and inspiring.

Final Message:

Looking forward to seeing what creative projects you come up with. Keep experimenting and have fun!

You're not limited to just plugging in one into your VEX GO brain or your IQ brain. You could use all four slots if you wanted with these LED bumpers. You just have to configure it that way. And, of course, you would need to use the multiple kits to do this. It would depend on your environment and whether you had that option, but it is something that you can do.

So just real quick, I'm gonna show you how I did this. (Aimee faintly speaking)

Okay. So another project for you. Do you wanna do the screen and screen there? Let's connect this up. Here. Okay. So here's my project. I just made it so that these LEDs would randomly blink on and off in different colors. The way I did it was by setting them all to brightness 100%. Then I put all of the LED bumpers in a forever loop with different wait times, turning them on and off pretty much randomly. I made this kinda fun sparkly display that you could use. I'll share this project with you too.

Just to show you in VEXcode when you're configuring, basically I did... Here, let's go all the way out. I'm gonna open up a new project just to show you. What I did was I said custom robot. I didn't choose codebase; I chose custom robot. Then I added the LED bumper one into port one. I added a device again, one in port two. I did this four times, but I only have three of them attached right now. So you get the idea. That's how you would configure that if you wanted to use multiple LEDs in one project.

All right. Keep switching my slide on here. I also wanted to point out that you can add VEX GO pieces. You might already have realized this, but just in case you haven't, VEX GO pieces can fit in these holes in art rings. If you wanted to create something that uses 123 but with GO pieces on top, you are able to do that. We might explore that in another session if people are interested in doing that. If you're working in a school where you have 123 and GO in your environment, that is an option for you. I wanted to make sure that I pointed that out as well.

Additionally, with either one of these projects, there are numerous ways you could extend them. If you wanted to add a story or a literacy component to your flying saucer or your animal, you could do that. If you wanted to challenge students to have two animals interact with each other in some way, have a dialogue, and make up a story, you could do that. There are so many different jumping-off points you could do with this. You could create a habitat for your animal or a planet for your flying saucers. One maker idea can lead to another maker idea, leading to another maker idea. There are many, many possibilities, really endless possibilities, that you could do just with the transparent materials, animals, and flying saucers.

I hope that this has sparked your creativity and gotten your ideas flowing. You probably are coming up with a million better ideas right now, and that's what I am hoping for, because that's the fun of a makerspace: you can do anything you want.

We have a few minutes left that I can take questions if anybody has them. I hope I didn't rush too quickly through this material. If you have anything you want to ask about any of this, please feel free to do so right now.

All right. One of the really cool things about live sessions is that we really want them to cater to your needs. Please post in the thread for this session any ideas that you have or things that you would like to discuss with makerspace.

In the next session, I'll do IQ projects instead of GO projects since they can be kind of similar. So if there's things you wanna see with IQ, that would be great. If there's a material you wanna explore, a specific coding idea, specific building ideas, please throw those into the PLC and we will definitely address those in the next makerspaces for our creative learning sessions.

Anybody have a last question they wanna ask that maybe Audra hasn't taken care of already?

Hey, Amy, it's Audra. Yeah, Audra. I'll ask you a question. Okay. So you talked a bit about using both VEX 123 and VEX GO together or mixed age experiences. And I know that you have a lot of experience with mixed age maker situations. Sometimes, particularly when you're mixing platforms, facilitating that can be a little bit of a challenge. At times, can you give some tips and tricks and pointers for how to ensure, you know, kind of smooth runnings of mixed age experiences, particularly when you have, you know, maybe kids that are used to using both of these platforms or have ownership over some of them somehow, how to kind of navigate that to help them work together?

Yeah, sure. So pretty much all of my makerspace experience is with multi-age groups. I would say in terms of kids having ownership over one platform or another, I think when you're working with kids in groups, before you ever do anything, you want to lay out some expectations. You can have a conversation with them about, okay, you know, maybe in your class, you use 123 all the time and you're a 123 expert. How can you share that 123 expert knowledge with your partners, but also let them have a say in what's happening? So going through and just setting some guidelines for how they're gonna work together is really important.

Giving kids roles that they should follow in a partnership or a group situation is really important. If you're having kids doing building, coding, and making, you would probably benefit by having them ahead of time decide who's gonna do the coding part, who's going to do the building part, who's gonna make the wings, who's gonna make the eyes, who gets to choose the materials. That kind of thing. I think actually choosing materials can be tricky too when you have... This isn't just multi-age groups, but when you have a limited supply of materials and you need to take turns with it, definitely setting up ahead of time a protocol for that. So, you know, if you've got four groups making animals and they all want the same materials, drawing straws and having them come up and pick one thing at a time, something like that to manage those materials so that doesn't create arguments is really important.

I think also with the multi-age situation, having a project that everyone is doing, like making an animal or making a flying saucer, but adapting it for different ages is the way to go, because then you are not trying to manage 15 different ideas at the same time. They're all kind of in the same wheelhouse, I guess, of ideas. So you're not jumping around cognitively trying to help everybody and then having everybody using either VEXcode 123 or VEXcode GO, or VEXcode IQ can be really, really useful.

Also, helping older students understand how to act as a mentor to younger students is really fantastic and quite amazing once the kids get used to it. It can be wonderful to watch older kids help younger kids and younger kids help older kids. So I think if kids are in an environment where you set that expectation over time, they end up just doing it naturally, which is awesome.

Did I answer all of the parts of that question, Audra?

Yeah, I think so. Okay. That was great.

No problem.

Yeah, I was also thinking that too. This is Desiree.

Hi, Desiree.

You know, just as we're finally finished our first, we are using VEX in what it's going to look like for us moving forward. That would be some good things for us to see. As I know, we do little things here and there where we have our older kids go down to the 123 and help them, but it's more of a help. So, thinking of some more ideas where we can collaborate and put a 123 lesson with a GO lesson to make it a lesson lesson, that would be something that we could do.

Yeah, and you could have your older kids use 123. They can benefit from the computer science aspect of it as they work with the younger kids together. I think that could be really fun. Also, thinking of having your younger kids have a project that they're going to share to display their knowledge, and then having the older kids be ready with questions to ask, making the younger kids feel like experts, can be really great for both groups of kids. That's a really fun activity too.

Anybody else have any questions, comments, or things they are excited to try?

Yeah, I'm gonna use the 123 for our maker night coming up at the end.

Oh, fantastic. Yeah, when that question came up in the PLC, I was like, yes, this is the perfect activity for this. So that's fantastic. Yes, as quick as easy. It won't take long; there could be a group of kids coloring and creating their lids and then groups that are already moving them. So yes, that works out perfectly.

Yeah. Oh, I'm so glad. That's fantastic.

All right, well, if nobody has anything else, I will let you go seven and a half minutes early. But this was a blast. I can't wait to do the next session. Definitely post in the PLC things that you're curious about, and we will try to address them next time.

Thanks for coming.

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